SEO often doesn’t have a fair seat at the table when marketing budgets are determined.
Although SEO is marketing.
As we approach a time when many companies are holding meetings in their conference rooms to determine budget allocations for the coming year, I want to help make the case for why SEO should have a voice in the room (and budget in your marketing). plans).
But first, let me address a little more why I think SEO doesn’t get its fair share.
Proving the value of SEO is complicated
SEO can be a challenge for some marketing departments to wrap their heads around. There are a lot of moving parts and it’s not as easy as PPC when you understand exactly how it works.
With PPC it is generally about:
Choose keywords. Write/place ads. Pay when someone clicks. Send this click to the landing page of your choice. Report on results (sales/customers).
Is true. SEO is more complex than that. And because of its complexity, I will often instruct potential clients to think carefully about not only when to invest in SEO, however Yes SEO is even a really viable investment in the first place. Often the answer to these questions is “it depends.”
Remember, an SEO investment isn’t just about hiring an agency or an in-house person to oversee and drive the strategy.
Unlike PPC, there are many other considerations, including:
Web design and development that may be required, such as: Creating a new navigation architecture / structure. Creation of new page templates to better support SEO. Creating a blog/resource section on your website (if you don’t already have one). Content , such as: Page content. Content with resources. Thought leadership, white papers or webinars. PR and Legal Reviews: Ensure content meets company compliance needs (especially for medical/pharma/legal/insurance and other highly regulated industries).
Example: My agency has a client who has hired us to help restructure their website (including an audit of their existing presence versus a competitor’s).
The work resulting from this audit has resulted in 130 hours of web development requirements that this customer must complete to completion in order to validate their investment with us.
I recommend that you consult with a trusted friend/partner who has SEO experience to help you make this determination. Many SEOs (the nice ones 😊) will be happy to provide a free opportunity analysis/assessment. Take advantage of the tips.
Today, I will assume that we have determined that there is an opportunity for SEO to deliver value to your business. Certainly, if you’re in the conference room trying to determine what, if anything, to budget for SEO, you’ll want to better understand:
The size of the opportunity. The size of the investment needed to get there.
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Size of the opportunity
When it comes to determining the “value” of an SEO effort, there are two sides to the coin.
An easy metric is to consider the “replacement cost” of traffic. If you were to buy that same traffic through PPC (which you are considering targeting through SEO), what would it cost? Semrush makes this available through its “Traffic Cost” metric:
Sometimes this can be a large number, as we see for Search Engine Land. You may find that many of your competitors realize this kind of value, but you don’t.
That may be as far as you need to make your case to the board that SEO is “worth the investment.” This is one way to measure it.
Understand the traffic potential of SEO efforts
But if you’re a mature marketer, you’ll try to move beyond “click value” to something more meaningful.
Tangible value sales White Paper Downloads. Webinar registrations.
How you measure this will depend on whether your business is e-commerce or B2B/lead generation. For both verticals, you’ll need to do two things:
Identify the possible keywords you’ll want to target. Determine what is needed to compete (ie site structure/link acquisition).
Since I am assuming that you are a marketing head and maybe not an SEO, so I would quickly suggest that you do this kind of assessment.
Using Semrush (subscription required), navigate to the Organic Search section. Here, you can enter the domains/website addresses for direct competitors that you think are doing well with their organic presence.
Once you’ve found a competitor that seems to have a significant organic presence, click the Top Organic Keywords section and click Show All Organic Keywords.
You will now see a complete list of your competitors’ keywords. But this will also include your competitors’ “brand” keywords (their company name, etc.). You must filter this:
Still, this data isn’t good. It shows us the keywords for which our competitor is ranking in the top 100 Google results.
Let’s make this more meaningful/useful by reducing this number to the rankings that “matter” (it’s a subjective metric). In this case, I will only care about the top 20 ranking keywords:
Now I have a viable list of keywords that I know are driving significant organic search traffic to my competitors:
This shows me that:
There are 19,029 keywords in the top 20 of Google. The “local guide program” is driving a lot of traffic to my competitor. The keyword “seo” would have cost me approximately $6.20 per click if I bought this traffic through Google Ads.
And, as mentioned above, we can see the “value” of these competitors’ unbranded organic traffic, based on their “replacement cost” (“Traffic Cost”):
If you are very ambitious, this is the next step you can take. Download the list of the top 20 rankings in a spreadsheet.
Create columns in your spreadsheet to make some assumptions (ie top rank 3; rank 4-7; rank 8-10; or you might want to get as granular as to estimate every 10th position).
Since we have the estimated monthly search volume for each keyword, you can now multiply these numbers by the potential click-through rate for each potential/future ranking.
Thanks to the work of Backlinko Average CTR on Google SERPwe have some estimates:
SEO is an imperfect science. But this at least gives you some visibility into the traffic potential out there for an investment. To sum up, put some math into the projections.
E-commerce and B2B/Lead Gen SEO Opportunity Assessment
Now that you have at least an idea of traffic potential, we need to break down the tasks to determine what “real” potential value might exist, in terms of more tangible things (sales/customers, etc.).
For the purposes of this article, I will focus on either an e-commerce website or a B2B/lead generation website.
Evaluation of e-commerce opportunities
If you are an e-commerce website, you should have a general idea of:
Conversion rate on a sale. Average (net) value of a sale.
Knowing these things, you can make some estimates on how much you could earn based on different degrees of traffic increase.
For example:
10,000 visits per month x 1.5% sales conversion rate = 150 sales. 150 sales x $300 average net worth of a sale = $45,000 per month.
By knowing this potential real value, you can assess whether the investment you think will be required in an SEO effort is “worth it.”
B2B Opportunity Assessment/Lead Gen
If you’re B2B/lead generation, you should have an idea of the conversion rate on a lead (and hopefully track form submissions, phone calls, chat/messaging apps, and other types of conversion/conversion) .
Working with it i your internal data on lead-to-qualified-lead and qualified-lead-to-sale conversion rates, you should be able to calculate ROI.
Given the same traffic potential as above (10,000), this is what this calculation might look like:
10,000 visitors x 5% lead conversion rate = 500 leads. Let’s assume that half of these leads are qualified (500 x .5 = 250). So let’s say we convert 40% of our qualified leads into a sale (250 x 0.4 = 100). So we have 100 potential sales from the SEO investment.
What is our average net worth of a sale?
Every business is different. We have a client whose average net worth of a sale is $400,000. This makes the ROI argument pretty easy to make.
But let’s say the average net worth of a sale is $400. At 100 sales x $400, that’s a net worth of $40,000 from your SEO investment.
Knowing this, you can determine how much you can profitably invest in an SEO effort.
Put the math in SEO
These formulas are far from perfect. But they do provide an opportunity to put the math behind what you’re asking for in an investment in an SEO effort.
You should also warn those involved that SEO is not a quick fix. You may spend the first few months of effort in deep research before major changes occur.
As mentioned above, other hard (internal) costs could be involved, such as a restructuring of your website, content additions, page additions, and PR or thought leadership articles. Do your best to keep these things in mind.
While there are times when I’ve strongly recommended that a company invest in an SEO effort, more often than not you’ll know me as a channel champion.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.
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About the author
Mark Jackson is the president and CEO of Vision Interactive, an agency founded in Dallas, Texas in 2005 and specializing in SEO Services, Paid Media Services (Search/Display/Social/Video/Amazon), Local Listing Management and Conversion Rate Optimization. Mark co-founded the Search Engine Marketing Association of Dallas-Fort Worth and the Search Engine Marketing Association of Kansas City and has contributed to Search Engine Watch, ClickZ, Pubcon and Search conferences Engine Strategies.
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